X.Org Reins In Their Cloud Costs, Switches Public Clouds

Last year we wrote how the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud hosting costs were getting out of control so much so that they would either need to start finding sponsors and/or cut the continuous integration (CI) services offered to the hosted open-source projects, among other measures, as the costs were ballooning greatly. Thanks to a number of improvements to their hosting configuration, that is becoming a more manageable amount.

Last year after they came to the realization how their cloud costs were getting out of control, they did make a number of improvements to tune their configuration in order to reduce costs. With that initial round of optimizations they went last year from spending around $6k USD on monthly cloud costs to around $3k and then continued their optimizations and other ways to spend less on the cloud.

One of the items toyed with last year was moving away from the Google Compute Engine and to a less costly public cloud provider. The X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org board was originally with Google's public cloud since they received credits from Google as well as at one point offered to fund an administrator to help with their hosting operations.

Fast forward to 2021, the X.Org Foundation has further lowered their cloud hosting costs by making that move away from Google for their cloud storage. By moving from Google GSE to Packet (well, now re-branded as Equinix Metal), that now-completed migration is saving them an additional ~$30 USD per day. Or likely just shy of roughly $1k per month in savings by going to Packet / Equinix Metal.

The X.Org board shared that the migration is complete and they are enjoying the cost savings. Thus the open-source projects hosted by X.Org / FreeDesktop.org shouldn't be at further risk of losing CI or other services while also not jeopardizing the X.Org Foundation's annual budget that is largely funded by the annual X.Org Developer Conference sponsorships.